Who holds which account in a partnership, and what moves when you leave
Your domain and analytics are in your name; repository, hosting and DNS are managed in ours. Why that split, and what has to be in writing either way.
Our position, stated plainly
What it looks like in practice
| Layer | Held by | The other party’s access |
|---|---|---|
| Domain registrar | Your company, always | Us as the administrative contact, so records and renewals can be handled |
| DNS provider | Our account, as the zone the site runs on | You, with a named account that can read and edit records |
| Hosting platform | Our organisation, as the project | You, with a named account that can see builds, logs and configuration |
| Code repository | Our organisation | You, as a member with access to the code and its history |
| Analytics and search tools | Your company as the property owner, inside an account we manage | Us as administrator |
| Form, email and other services | Differs per service | Configuration access for whoever does not hold it |
Why it protects you
- Nothing depends on goodwill. The transfer promise and the no-withholding promise are in the terms, where changing them takes a negotiation you are present for.
- Leaving is administrative. Layers you hold: remove a collaborator. Layers we hold: request the transfer, receive the documentation, carry on with whoever comes next.
- Continuity through change. If we were acquired, restructured or simply lost a person, the contract still says what happens to every layer.
- Visibility. You have a named account on the layers we manage, so you can see the builds, the records and the history while the work is happening.
Why it protects us
We never want to be the reason a client’s business is offline. A missed payment on our side, an account problem, a dispute about an invoice or a disagreement about direction could, in principle, touch a client’s website, and some of those accounts are ours to manage. That is why the protection is written into our terms rather than left to how the accounts happen to be arranged: deliverables already in production, and your access to them, are never withheld and are transferred on request regardless of any dispute. An arrangement can change without you; a clause cannot.
The hour it costs, whichever way the split goes
- Decide per layer who holds it, before the work starts, rather than discovering it two years later.
- Secure what you hold with two-factor authentication on a device the company controls, recovery codes in the company password manager, and a shared company email as the recovery address.
- Get named access to the layers the other party holds, so nothing is visible to one side only.
- Record it on the who-owns-what page, with the transfer promise next to it. Done.
What this means for you
Ask any current or prospective supplier two questions per layer: who is the account holder, and will you put in writing that it moves to me on request. The first answer tells you where you stand today. The second tells you what happens on the day it matters, and it is the one worth having in a document rather than in an email.
Frequently asked questions
Why not set every account up in our name from the start?
You can, and some clients do. It costs about an hour of setup and it removes a question later. What it does not do by itself is protect you: an account in your name with a supplier who holds the only working login, the only copy of the code or the only person who knows the deploy steps is not safer than a managed account with a written transfer promise. Decide the split per layer, write it down, and make the promise part of the contract rather than part of the sales conversation.
What access do you actually need?
Enough to do the work, no more, in both directions. In accounts you hold: a role on the hosting project that can deploy and configure, a DNS role that can edit records, collaborator access on the repository, an analytics role that can read and configure, never billing and never the ability to remove you. In accounts we hold: you get a named account with access to the same things, so the work is visible to you while it happens rather than reported afterwards.
What happens to access when the partnership ends?
Layers in your own accounts need nothing: you remove us. Layers we manage are transferred to an account in your name, on request, and our terms say that access to work already in production is never withheld and is transferred regardless of any dispute. We hand over current documentation and confirm what runs where. There is no negotiation stage, because the promise is in the contract and not in our goodwill.